(The editor’s note: The following story contains spoilers for the “Materialists“Especially its end.)
“Materialists“Has more on one’s mind than your romantic drama standard edition: It is a cut of modern dating and how poor it can be, with Celine songS Latest A24 cooperation Using IRL -Matchmaking as a smart (and more cinematic) template for her requests rather than doing film Sweep-centered.
Dakota Johnson Plays Lucy, whose $ 80,000 a year Manhattan Matchmaking job at the company Adore has equipped her with a hardened cynicism against dating and romance, about how we as single people turn us into value-based goods to make us more desirable. Her last meaningful relationship was with struggling theater actor John (Chris Evans), who has been an ex for some time and with what things ended badly among disagreements about money and the future, until she meets financier Harry (Pedro Pascal) at a client’s wedding. They fall into a quick, glossy throw, over Martinis and in Harry’s scandalous expensive penthouse, after she originally sizes him as a possible client and insists that she does not turn him on at that wedding when she asks about his height and income.
Lucy, after eventually breaking with Harry when she confronts how there is some spark here and just before a planned trip to Iceland, is eventually reunited with John. He has long still kept a light and imagined a future for the two, while he feels insufficient about his financial status and lack of a proverbial medication, a little to offer except his deep emotions. (Lucy, a failed actress, also has many debts.)
But Lucy’s division with Harry also coexists with the reality control that Harry is not the dating market unicorn as she thought. He has revealed to have undergone a bone extension procedure to make himself higher, a rather gloomy and body-fright-like phenomenon apparently, increasingly endemically for the modern dating world, which Lucy previously joked with a colleague (Dasha Nekrasova). It is another illustration of how we commodify and objective ourselves to Hoped-for Partnership, which is one of Song’s main interests in this deceptively romantic film that ends sunny, but with an ellipse if you look carefully.
“Materialists” is wound up with a quotation-Cott Hollywood ending, John suggests Lucy in an idyllic pocket in Central Park while she has only been offered a large campaign to drive adore-and an empty check in terms of pay potential. It is a campaign that she is unsure that she will make, a decision that has been ambiguous in the script.
“For a Hollywood ending, the line is at the end of the movie, the last line and line that is meant to be the most romantic line,” How would you like to make a very bad financial decision? “, Song told Indiewire, with reference to how John sets up his marriage proposal.” You never know, and that’s why it ends in a marriage Bureau (The Film’s True Last Shot). We don’t know how many of those marriages that happen in city hall, how many are going to work. But we know in the news that 50 percent of them will fail. If you ask me what’s going to happen to lucy and john, it’s 50-50. Unless eiter of them reaches a different tier in their class – IF Lucy Takes the Promotion, or John Catches a Slightly Bigger Break – Their The chance to stay together would sink on.
The last shot of “materialists”, when the credits start, is of a lively marriage hall at City Clerk’s Office in Manhattan, an everyday image in strong, back-to-earth-contrast with the central park moment, which is visually straight out of a more traditional rom-com but is in itself a business proposal. We then see marriage licenses submitted in City Hall, Lucy and John’s among them, such as cheap supermarket balloons Bobble, and Japanese breakfast’s suitable title Original song “My Baby (got nothing)” games and “materialists” end.
“I wanted it to be like DMV, as it is. You want it to look like a safety camera DMV. It’s kind of what the city hall is. I got married in the City Hall,” said Song, whose husband is screenwriter Justin Kuritzkes. “It is both the most romantic place on earth and the least romantic on earth. The contradiction I was so interested in. Anyone want to get married in New York City, they have to go there. It’s such a special experience. You’re sitting there. You take a number. It’s like a deli counter. It really feels like you are at Katz or something. Connected to Caveman -Grader. ”
Song’s film also begins and ends the entire circle with a book head with pictures of a primordial imprisonment from the cave time, two early gay sapiens consent to a paleolithic version of a formal union wordless.
“We know that these tools have gone from one area to another. We have a historical post of it. What we do not know is what passed between these two people,” Song said. “What I am really interested in is the concrete records of marriage. Each historian will tell you the most reliable record is the marriage record. One of the best ways to track historical figures and history is generally a marriage record. Now everyone was there with some equalities about how these two people married us. Love, which has no record.
Also think about the fact that Lucy and John who start again are partially taken to a head of the detected crisis with their client Sophie (Zoë Winters), who previously tells Lucy, “I am not goods. I am a person”, when another matchmaking set goes angry. Sophie is later attacked sexually by one of Lucy’s matches, Mark P. (The voice of “Past Lives” star John Magaro), which causes her to break off the bands with Adore and Lucy while threatening legal action.
After Harry-Breakup, Lucy, with nowhere to go, after enduring the apartment she can hardly afford anyway, a wedding in New York crashes with John-Hans Cater-Waiter jobs gets them in there. After a dance and a kiss and shipping promises have been replaced, Lucy gets a call from Sophie that Mark is now pursuing her outside her apartment. Lucy and John Speed Back to the city to Sophie’s place, where Lucy stays the night to comfort his former client while John is waiting for the bend outside until the morning, which leads to Jesus (and rushed off all Pragmatist standards) to come back together.
“Although Lucy and John can’t, we know what passed between them on that slope, that dance, we know it was real. For the cave people, that flower ring was also real. So what do we think is actually the real thing?” Said Song. “Have we been so completely wrapped in the numbers and the algorithm … that is what we think is more real than true love?”
During the film’s sometimes slicker, more satisfying Rome-Dram-Beats, Song is always as an enthnographer how dehumanization of the dating world can be, leading to the film’s most cruel fun slapstick moment: Harry confesses to Lucy, the middle of mining, if the ben surgery that made him six inches, and still leaves him. He stands in his untouched kitchen and lowers six inches to show what he used to look like. (The average cost of this operation is on average $ 75,000 or more. This means that Bones are broken, including horror.)
“We see the way (dating market) also affects Harry, that throughout the movie we think we were over it or beat the game. He has everything he wants, and we are, no, it crushes Harry as much as everyone else, this dating market. When he gets that surgery, the thing with that operation is, how can you say this is how the value system works, how you can do it to And how can you do it to do it to do it, “the song?
Read more about how “materialists” scaling back the commodified self -deceptions in the dating market in Indieview’s previous interview with Song here.
“Materialists” are now in theaters from A24.
